Google’s Roadmap to World Domination

February 21, 2014 Leave a comment

Google’s Roadmap to World Domination

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“We want to paint the world, about one pixel to one inch.”–Luc Vincent, head of imagery for Google Maps

Welcome to the future:
Where your house keys will tell you they’re still on your desk at work
Your tools will remind you you loaned them to a friend
Your car will drive itself to retrieve both
(Google Promises a Self-Driving Car in 4 years)[1]
(Tesla in three)[1]

Location awareness will be built into everything
And maps will be the operating system (of everything)

Currently: 20% of all Google searches are ‘where’ queries.
Giving Google 70% of the ‘where’ query market
Location based services keep smartphones running.

Components of Google Maps(1)
(3)Trekker stitches together a digital world

15 virtual shutters snap every two seconds
Photos are melded into one 360 degree image
Tagged with Latitude and Longitude
—– 3 eight hour days with trekker down the Colorado river
Potentially yielded as many pictures as 20,000 yearly tourists visiting for 50 years.

Cameras like trecker are attached to Google’s self driving cars
25 of which have logged 600,000 miles in California.
Streetview has images in 1/4 of the world’s countries.

But it’s not an easy job, reconciling so many data sources:
Google has 2000 ground-truthers “driving” through cyberspace every day[1]:
Reconciling map data and street view data.

Google Map Maker allows users to submit changes, honing the map even more.

The acquisition of Waze presents Google with real time map updating technology.

Timeline of Google Maps(1)(2)(3)

2001– Larry Page taking pictures of San Francisco with a video camera mounted to the side of his car.
October 2004– Google acquires Where 2 Technologies, a company working on an early downloadable version similar to Google Maps.[4]
October 2004– Google acquires Keyhole, a geospatial data visualization company working on an early version of Google Earth.[3]
2004– Luc Vincent’s personal project (20% of Google employee time to devote to your own project) is Street View.
2005– Amazon’s search technology subsidiary A9.com unveils Block View, essentially Yellow Pages with storefront photos. Discontinued after 20 months.
2006–Microsoft’s Streetside debuts with photo rendering of two cities.
2007–Google’s Street View arrives in 5 cities.
2008– Google’s Oyster, or geographic database is greatly expanded with Geological srvey data, buying of data sources, and satilite imagery.
2009– Google Moon launched to commemorate 36th annivursary of moon landing.[5]
2011– Google Map Maker allows users to change maps, instead of waiting on GIS company data.
June 2012–Apple announces their own map service for iOS6.[2]
December 2012–Google announces a Google Maps app for iOS, immediately becomes most popular app in app store.[2]
May 2013–Google recognizes Palestine as a country, instead of redirecting to Palistinian Territories.[7]
2013– Google buys Waze, the social traffic app for close to $1 billion.
2013– Google releases Tactile in preview mode, the future of Google Maps with 3d rendering of whether and buildings.
January 2014–Google uploads 370,000 miles of Street View imagery, largest update ever.[6]

Google Maps API: the backbone of an industry(2)

Companies Built on Google Maps API
-AirBnB
-RedFin
-Uber
-RelayRides
-TaskRabbit
-Lyft
-NeighborGoods
And thousands of others.

In early 2012 Google started charging for companies using:
25,000 map related requests a day
For 90 consecutive days

99% API using sites unaffected
3,500 large business deeply affected:

Big Business Left:
Foursquare, on 6% of smartphones worldwide
Wikipedia
And Apple…

A rival was born
OpenStreetMaps: open source
Backed by:
Microsoft[2]
Hundreds of Thousands of individuals
Used by:
Craigslist, Geocaching, Mapquest, JMP Statistical Software, Apple

Overnight, 20% of the smartphone market, the iOS users left.
But were reclaimed several months later with an iOS Google Maps App.

Today: Open vs. Google
OpenStreetMaps is used by thousands of firms, including Apple and Foursquare.
(Started by mapping nerds several years ago, and enhanced by donations of satellite imagery from Apple.)

“Open” normally wins
Open Hardware > IBM Monopoly
Open Software > Microsoft Monopoly
???Open Data > Google Monopoly???

But doesn’t Google normally win, too?

 

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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